Design on a Dime

The Porchlight aesthetic is economical elegance. Ours is a very intimate theatre (seating 148 people) and our scenic, costume, prop, and lighting choices need to hold up to intense, close scrutiny. It is far better to have one perfect prop chair that to have a sea of inappropriate, cheap scenery.

We take large scale shows and refine them to their bare essence. This restriction often produces surprisingly imaginative results. When creative people are faced with a challenge, they deal with it.....creatively.

Our challenge with Pacific Overtures is how to transport the audience to feudal and contemporary Japan, and create characters with the look and feel of this very foreign land. The original production of Pacific Overtures featured a cast of 35 actors; ours will have 11. The play calls for approximately 14-20 different locations, we will have one unit set. Every actor plays between 1 and 6 different roles. This is going to call for a lot of imaginative solutions.

Today I met with costume designer Carol Blanchard. She is designing a standard, white costume Hakama (袴) with a top that all the actors will wear. Each character will be defined with select costume accessories, hair/wig styles, makeup and hand props. She and I spent some time working through the various pieces that will create each character.

The white costumes will be painted with the lighting design by John Horan. These austere costumes will help to transport the audience to our foreign land, where the shape and texture of each piece will perceived as authentically Japanese.

(Side note: Costumer Carol tells me there are no authentically Japanese fabrics in the city of Chicago. She is calling on national and international resources to dress our show.)

We are working to get the costumes into the rehearsal process as soon as possible. The billowy fabrics which drape to the floor will affect the actor's movement. The zori (flip-flop style sandals) will take a lot of getting used to.